Volume 24, Issue 2

Abaza, a polysynthetic ergative Northwest Caucasian language, possesses a typologically unique system of forming content questions by means of inflectional marking in the verb. I offer a detailed description of this peculiar system, showing how it is grounded in the more general pattern of encoding relativization by means of prefixes forming part of the basic cross-referencing paradigms. I also discuss a tentative diachronic scenario, explaining how at least a subpart of the synthetic interrogative marking in Abaza (and its close relative Abkhaz) could have emerged via univerbation of pseudocleft focus constructions.

Sound symbolism emerged as a prevalent component in the origin and development of language. However, as previous studies have either been lacking in scope or in phonetic granularity, the present study investigates the phonetic and semantic features involved from a bottom-up perspective. By analyzing the phonemes of 344 near-universal concepts in 245 language families, we establish 125 sound-meaning associations. The results also show that between 19 and 40 of the items of the Swadesh-100 list are sound symbolic, which calls into question the list’s ability to determine genetic relationships. In addition, by combining co-occurring semantic and phonetic features between the sound symbolic concepts, 20 macro-concepts can be identified, e. g. basic descriptors, deictic distinctions and kinship attributes. Furthermore, all identified macro-concepts can be grounded in four types of sound symbolism: (a) unimodal imitation ( onomatopoeia ); (b) cross-modal imitation ( vocal gestures ); (c) diagrammatic mappings based on relation ( relative ); or (d) situational mappings ( circumstantial ). These findings show that sound symbolism is rooted in the human perception of the body and its interaction with the surrounding world, and could therefore have originated as a bootstrapping mechanism, which can help us understand the bio-cultural origins of human language, the mental lexicon and language diversity.

Nordlinger & Sadler’s (2004. Nominal tense in crosslinguistic perspective. Language 80. 776–806) seminal work fostered an intense debate on the semantics of nominal tense systems, with the side effect of widening the typological coverage of this grammatical feature. This paper aims at contributing to the ongoing debate. In contrast with work by Tonhauser, who excluded ‘tense’ as a semantic component of the Paraguayan Guaraní nominal tense system, the paper claims that all TAM dimensions are involved – temporality, aspect, modality – with different proportions in the individual markers. Most importantly, it claims that nominal tense does not presuppose a semantics of its own, other than the one needed for verbal tenses. Moreover, the paper presents evidence that the semantic component of aspect, besides being necessarily activated in any nominal tense marker, is also directly conveyed by some of them, which can legitimately be called ‘nominal aspect’ markers. This integrates Nordlinger & Sadler’s (2004) survey, in which aspect was notably absent. In addition, the paper points out possible cases of nominal actionality (a.k.a. Aktionsart). Finally, the paper suggests that the pervasive presence of aspect (and also, but rarely, actionality) among nominal tense markers finds interesting parallels in some types of deverbal nominalizations, although these belong in another grammatical drawer.

Capitalizing upon the typological fact that the same content may be coded in different positions and at different structural levels, this study examines whether the syntactic and the morphological levels exhibit different serial-order preferences. A large-scale comparison of word and morpheme order across six grammatical categories including definiteness and negation reveals that all six categories document the same interaction effect: the syntactic level shows a significantly higher preposing rate than the morphological level does. A morphological postposing bias is observed for five categories, a syntactic preposing bias for four and a syntactic postposing bias for two. This interaction effect is not affected by a genealogical or areal bias. The empirical patterns are mainly shaped by a predilection for lexical material to precede grammatical material. Early placement may also be brought about by ultra-high token frequency. The fact that the postposing bias does occur sporadically at the syntactic level casts some doubt on the well-known suffixing preference as the appropriate level of generalization.